“You may change your mind by that time,” observed Seth. “This ain't no
place for a chap with your trainin', and I know it. It does well enough
for an old derelict like me, with nobody to care a hang whether he lives
or dies, but you're different. And even for me the lonesomeness of it
drives me 'most crazy sometimes. I've noticed you've been havin' blue
streaks more often than when you first came. I cal'late that by fall
you'll be headin' somewheres else, Mr. 'John Brown,'” with significant
emphasis upon the name.
Brown stoutly denied being “bluer” than usual, and his superior did not
press the point. Seth busied himself in his spare time with the work on
the Daisy M. and with his occasional trips behind Joshua to the village.
Brown might have made some of these trips, but he did not care to.
Solitude and seclusion he still desired, and there were more of these
than anything else at the Twin-Lights.
The lightkeeper experimented with no more dogs, but he had evidently not
forgotten the lifesaving man's warning concerning possible thieves, for
he purchased a big spring-lock in Eastboro and attached it to the door
of the boathouse on the little wharf. The lock was, at first, a good
deal more of a nuisance than an advantage, for the key was always being
forgotten or mislaid, and, on one occasion, the door blew shut with
Atkins inside the building, and he pounded and shrieked for ten minutes
before his helper heard him and descended to the rescue.
June crawled by, and July came. Crawled is the proper word, for John
Brown had never known days so long or weeks so unending as those of that
early summer. The monotony was almost never broken, and he began to find
it deadly. He invented new duties about the lights and added swimming
and walks up and down the beach to his limited list of recreations.
The swimming he especially enjoyed. The cove made a fine bathing place,
and the boathouse was his dressing room, though the fragrance of the
ancient fish nets stored within it was not that of attar of roses. A
cheap bathing suit was one of the luxuries Atkins had bought for him, by
request, in Eastboro. Seth bought the suit under protest, for he scoffed
openly at his helper's daily bath.
“I should think,” the lightkeeper declared over and over again, “that
you'd had salt water soak enough to last you for one spell; a feller
that come as nigh drownin' as you done!”
Seth did not care for swimming; the washtub every Saturday night
furnished him with baths sufficient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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